I just want to scream I didn’t realize until this afternoon how much of a vacation my series of columns about mandatory chapel at West Point had been for me.

I guess it’s luck on our part that Donald Trump is such an incompetent fool that we have lost the war with Iran, because it’s likely that no more of our people will be killed, and no more Iranian civilians will die.
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Whatever happened to expertise? As a writer, I haven’t spent very much time working for what we now call the mainstream media.

With everyone in Trump’s administration taking example from the biggest no-nothing of them all, it isn’t just know-nothing-ism that’s on the march. It’s gin-soaked-know-nothing-ism, and Trump himself doesn’t even have alcohol abuse as an excuse.
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Iran’s strategy for dealing with Trump: Wait. Wait some more. Keep waiting. He'll cave. I’ve heard there were a few developments while I was writing the West Point Chapel Case chapters.

Trump will squeak and moan and whine and brag on Truth Social that he “won” in Iran. Iran will know the truth, and they will make sure that the whole world knows what a pitiful helpless crumbling lying fool is Donald Trump.
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The West Point Chapel Case – Chapter Six Having come within one very tense Superintendent’s Board of not graduating from West Point, I can’t tell you that I had very high hopes for my nascent army career.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Hegseth tries to re-institute mandatory chapel attendance at West Point and the other Academies. The virus of religious prejudice is like measles, the most transmissible disease there is.
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The West Point Chapel Case – Chapter Five-and-a-half This is kind of embarrassing.

I said, that’s bullshit, Dad. But it wasn’t. When I got in the Army, I knew more than any 22-year-old Second Lieutenant should know about men and power and the army. That knowledge and what I did with it would end my career almost exactly one year later.
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The West Point Chapel Case -- Chapter Five Alexander M.

In my army personnel file was a letter on White House stationery from Brigadier General Alexander Haig. It was a warning that this officer, Truscott, was a known radical who was disloyal to the army and was suspected of being a Communist.
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The West Point Chapel Case – Chapter Four Being a cadet changed in important ways every year.

Haig took his feet off his desk and slapped a little stack of papers, saying they were the requests we had handed in to the finance department. Glaring at me, he said, I know what you’re up to. This is a way to go after mandatory chapel, isn’t it?
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How Trump Is Breaking Our Military | Stuart Stevens Talks to Author Lucian Truscott "The difference between then and now is we don't have anybody serious in this government, from the president on down."

How Trump Is Breaking Our Military | Stuart Stevens Talks to Author Lucian Truscott
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The West Point Chapel Case – Chapter Three Some context might be be useful before we dive back into things.

We’re talking about the year 1967, what you might call a pivotal year for the country and the war in Vietnam. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album was released. Jimi Hendrix came out with his important first album, Are You Experienced.
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We are breaking the heart of the world As species Ignoramus Americanus, our behavior during this century has been disastrous for the planet and its people.

We have broken our own hearts and the hearts of everyone who once believed in us as a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. It is left to us to turn the lights on again and power them without killing ourselves and the living things around us.
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Taking the day off. It's my birthday! The telegram from Fukuoka, Japan, is addressed to my maternal grandmother, Virginia Harloe.

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The West Point Chapel Case – Chapter Two I remember like it was yesterday the summer I sat down to write the novel that became Dress Gray at a folding table in the house I had rented in Sag Harbor.

I reported to the office of the brand new colonel who had just been assigned to be the Third Regimental Tactical Officer. His name was Colonel Alexander M. Haig. Yes, that Alexander M. Haig.

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Melania denies that she did anything she would need to deny with the guy she denies knowing while denying she ever flew on the his plane or visited his island with his pimp whom she denies knowing Roy Cohn would be so proud.

Roy Cohn would be so proud.
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The West Point Chapel Case I’m sure that you’ve read about Hegseth’s firing of the general in charge of army chaplains, as well as his invocation of the name of God to justify the war on Iran.

In four years at West Point, I don’t think I told anyone I was a descendent of Jefferson. I certainly did not tell any of the West Point authorities with whom a few years later I would do battle over the issue of mandatory chapel.
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Forty days of war crimes How do you lose a war against a country with one-tenth the wealth of the U.S.?

I guess we have reached the sad nadir as a nation that we should be thankful Trump is an outrageous crook. The only thing that’s saving us, and the world, from Trump using a nuclear weapon is his greed.
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It’s not TACO, it’s chicken nuggets We don’t have the fine print yet, and even if we did, it would be meaningless, but the big news just after 6:30 tonight is that Trump has agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran.

As a wartime president, he is just the same hollow poseur he’s always been. He didn’t get a victory, he got the same sort of lame-ass withdrawal that has ended every other war we have fought since 1945.
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A man and two of his several cats That’s our most recent rescue stray, Little, who as you can see has made herself a comfortable home with Tracy and me and Ruby and Box Cat and Tuli and Uno and Gracie.

I decided to finally accomplish my taking-a-night-off mission with photos of me and our cats, because there is no need, tonight at least, to further annoy and disturb my loyal readers, because cats good and Trump bad.
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I’m going to punch you in the nose You don’t forget the first time a bully tries to push you around.

Donald Trump will never learn what people without his privilege have known all their lives. It is why he will lose his war on Iran, and he will lose the war he has waged against his own people in his own country.

He is a bully and we aren’t.
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Don’t believe a syllable of what they’ve told us about the war on Iran I don’t believe that wars are like rock concerts, where the press gets VIP tickets and gets to talk to the band backstage after the show.

Physically, he resembles a hunched-over half-speed Frankenstein monster, and he goes from jabbering like a magpie to mumbling like an animated corpse in a horror movie, sometimes within moments.

And it’s all business as usual to the mainstream media.
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Why Hegseth’s firings and interference in military promotions are so dangerous Pentagon staffers have reportedly begun referring to their big boss, Pete Hegseth, as Dumb McNamara, a reference to the Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson who oversaw the disastrous U.S.

I have to say that I am glad my father and my grandfathers are dead and buried and are not here to see the desecration of the service to this country which they loved and to which they dedicated their lives.
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Yet another day when you just can’t make this shit up I was going to write a column tonight about Trump’s -- uh, what should it be called?

This is where we find ourselves, We have a physically ill and mentally disabled president and a war overseen by a dry drunk Christian nationalist with Nazi tattoos on his body who has compared the war against a nation of Muslims to the Crusades.
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I’ll bet you don’t have one of these I listened to the entire Supreme Court hearing on the case challenging the constitutionality of Donald Trump’s executive order nullifying the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, and n...

I would employ the satirical phrase from the movie “Borat” – “Is this a great country, or what?” – except for the sad fact that Trump and MAGA Republicans have made it nearly impossible to satirize the state in which we find ourselves in 2026.
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A vacillating, befuddled, confused, meandering, occasionally dozing Donald Trump now thinks he's hosting "Deal or No Deal." Donald J.

Oil tankers are on fire and missiles and drones are landing in the Middle East and oil and gas prices going up, and the only regime change I can see on the horizon is right here at home in November when the Republican regime loses control of Congress.
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How to lose three wars at once The short answer to that question is, be Donald Trump.

Trump said, “We’re going to win so much that you’re going to be sick and tired. You’re going to say, Please let us have at least one loss.”

Well, we’re going to get a big one that he is not prepared for. We’ll need more than Pete Hegseth praying for us.
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Let's remember how truly loathsome this monster is He was best friends with a convicted pedophile.

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To be human It’s getting harder and harder to identify actual human beings, isn’t it?

If life makes you angry, deal with it. You are not going to run out the clock. Because you are human, the rules dictate that the clock is going to outrun you. In the meantime, as my mother counseled, be kind to others. You, and they, will live longer.
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Another day, another zombie apocalypse It’s Thursday.

As soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division arrive in the Middle East fully equipped for Trump’s war, he will depart the White House tomorrow for Palm Beach, Florida, where he will spend the weekend playing golf.
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The 2,000-year-old Persian rug problem They have been there a long time.

They have been there a long time. What we want from them has been there even longer.

If you think I’m talking about oil and the war in Iran and Trump trying to negotiate his way out of it, I am. But I’m also talking about buying rugs in the Middle East.
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Zig zagging between fear and mortal dread One of the pleasures of writing this column, in fact, one of the pleasures of being a writer is the opportunity to live in two worlds at once.

If we survive the next year without a nuclear accident or an intentional explosion somewhere in the Middle East, it will be a miracle. In the meantime, we wrestle to find meaning in a maelstrom that has made us afraid for ourselves and for each other.
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Who gets a vote about how this war ends? In the memorable words of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the enemy gets a vote.

Trump and Bibi? Watch what they do, not what they say.
Trumps likes bombing things, but he loves money and power even more, and both are slipping away from him in Iran.
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